Thursday, July 25, 2013

Today we announced the introduction of Express Books™, which gives academics the chance to bypass traditional routes and publish entire works to be distributed through our parent company SharedBook's e-commerce system.

Imagine being able to keep your own copyright, being able to choose the size of your book, the cover of your book, and holding on to 100% of the royalties you've earned. And further, imagine getting a direct link and button that you can put on any web page and have students, other academics, or even the general public purchase your book. That's Express Books.

Friday, July 12, 2013

AcademicPub’s
Curriculum Development Team recently released a number of “Intro Books" (see the press release here) designed to be adapted, remixed, and used in a wide range of 100 level courses. We sat down and talked to the team about
their exciting work.

AP: Your
backgrounds are in education; can you speak to that and how it has informed the
way that you’ve gone about creating these books?

As educators, when we begin to build a
course book, we think of all the students who have passed through a classroom
thirty or forty at a time. We remember how important it is to create a
curriculum that meets the needs of the front row and the back row. What do we
mean by this? Well, imagine an introductory college class on the first day. The
first row is full of students who more than likely have enjoyed success in the
traditional classroom environment. Notebooks out, eyes up, they are usually
strong writers with good verbal skills: the classic linguistic learners. A good
course pack will include the core readings for the subject as well as some
interpretive texts and articles that will stimulate this first row group.

Now picture the back row. Perhaps it
includes visual learners very aware of the dynamics of the room and ready to observe things from a distance, or
interpersonal learners who would prefer to engage one another rather than sit
and take notes. For this no less talented constituency, our books incorporate
multimedia elements like video and embedded Internet links. For example, an
introduction to psychology custom book would have links to different
personality inventories students can take to assess themselves. Or a speech
class student can reinforce a text on logical fallacies by connecting to a
video that asks her to detect the faulty claims in a series of television
commercials.

Now in the real world, we think most
students find themselves in both "rows" in different subject areas
and at different stages of their education, but for a teacher planning for a
heterogeneous classroom, the imperative is to construct a text that reaches
each student where one finds him.

AP: Tell us about the different books that you’ve created.

The books we have created include subject
areas like sociology, psychology and political science, as well as process
oriented classes like study skills. For introductory classes like sociology,
for instance, there are several open source textbooks available that make it
possible to anchor an ebook with an excellent peer-reviewed, cost-effective
resource. For a class like study skills, where the best resources are found on
the internet, the coursebook includes links to note taking skills videos from
Dartmouth; self assessments to help reduce test anxiety, as well as a study
skills text for the math classroom from our own platform.

AP: Generally, what’s the process for creating one of these books?

Frequently a book begins when a professor
sends along his or her syllabus. While they are happy with the scope and
sequence of the course, they want to break free from the two or three textbooks
that dominate their class offerings, and create a book that reflects their
expertise. The AcademicPub book will not only include a professor's classroom
materials (slides, lecture notes, etc.) and select chapters from texts they may
have used in the past, but new additions such as links to online texts, or
current scholarship--journal articles, book chapters--from academic presses
partnered with AcademicPub. Our job is not to dictate what the experts should
teach (that’s what the big textbook publishers do, often to the consternation
of our users), but to act as guides who can show them what is possible. There
is no definitive book; rather, each introductory course pack is a jumping off
point for a book that the professor revisits and updates as their courses
evolve and grow.

AP: Is there a price point you generally try to adhere to? How is that
accomplished?

A course pack should never cost more than
a standard textbook, and, typically, the eBook will be far less expensive. For
example, instead of buying an entire textbook for the five or six most
important chapters, just those selections are pulled out and put into the
eBook. This keeps the cost of the book at a point where important articles, or
essential topics covered in other texts can be added. The final book is both
more affordable and a better fit for the goals of a particular curriculum.

AP: Who do you see using these books?

We see forward-thinking professors using
AcademicPub custom books: educators, who want to use an excellent -- while affordable -- course pack. Finding this sweet spot is not always easy, but AcademicPub makes
it possible for professors to combine their own course materials with texts
from academic presses and thousands of OER sources into a much more effective
text than the traditional, one-size-fits-all textbook.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Here at AcademicPub we have always believed that the ability to add a wide range of content is paramount to building a successful course pack.

We already offer access to our library of more than eight million pieces of content from over two hundred and forty publishers through a variety of means, including our Recommendation Engine, which suggests content that your peers have used, as well as materials that you've used before:

Today we're excited to announce a new, particularly efficient method to find the material you need when you know exactly what you're looking for. We call it Locate Content.

When you know the exact title or the ISBN of the content you wish to add to your custom textbook, this feature provides an easy, quick way to find and include it.

For example:

Additionally, in those rare cases that the library does not contain the piece of content a user is seeking, we've added the ability to automatically tell us to reach out to the publisher to acquire the rights for that content on your behalf:

Finding, discovering, browsing, and locating all the content you need has never been easier than with AcademicPub.